Creating a flow of volunteering information

A collection of widgets that quickly help our clients in accessing the National Volunteering Database.

Enabling people to harness the national volunteering network

A self-funded project of ours, originally created to ease our work load when volunteering-involving organisations asked for the opportunities they entered into VIKTOR to be displayed on their website. This grew and now our suite of ‘widgets’ connect volunteering-involving organisations, businesses and universities into the online volunteering space.

The Pitch

The search widget enables our clients to give their website users the opportunity to search and express interest in a filtered list of opportunities. We made this flexible so that it could suit a number of different applications, for example, a business could restrict the search to opportunities within a certain location or even skip the search component and just show their employees a list of opportunities that align with their corporate values. The style and design was kept minimal so it can be easily tailored to suit the website they are embedded in.

The map widget followed quickly, adding an alternative view of the search widget that was more visually appealing and has been especially popular for statewide or national organisations.

The registration widget is aimed at recruiting organisations and is popular for Volunteer Resource Centres. It collects all the necessary information and populates VIKTOR saving the double handing of the information.

The Result

The client said:

Eduka's pro-bono support should be lauded as an example of how small business can make a difference not just within their own community/locality but nationally as well. We are just so lucky to have Ashul and his team look after the volunteering sector providing much needed data and IT skills.

The consultant said:

When we are custodians of information. Providing many avenues to disseminate that information so it can assist people is our duty. We are so lucky to be able to use our app dev skills to help the volunteering sector.

The developer said:

There were a lot of technical challenges we had to overcome when developing the new version of widgets. We identified that previously one of the most difficult and cumbersome steps involved, was the initial setup as we had multiple Javascript files each with different dependencies requiring different setup code which resulted in more bugs and user dissatisfaction. Therefore, with the new version we aimed to make sure that our widget was easy to setup, easy to customize and less prone to bugs, all whilst implementing regularly requested features, such as the ability to share opportunities via a unique url. By identifying and addressing our most common client issues, we have developed a solution that is not only user friendly but also developer friendly for other organisations and agencies.

The designer said:

Designing a widget to be implemented nation wide across multiple websites all with different designs, use cases and locations posed a real challenge. Finding the right balance between incorporating default existing websites styles and our own generic design allowed us to create what now powers over 50 volunteering agencies and organisations, meaning it has never been easier for volunteers to find opportunities within their local community.